Agentic AI Everywhere: The Future of Autonomous Intelligence? - podcast episode cover

Agentic AI Everywhere: The Future of Autonomous Intelligence?

Apr 23, 20251 hr 7 minEp. 1
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

In this episode of Mainly AI, hosts Dan Mitchell and Viby Jacob dive into the topic of agentic AI with guests Neetu Pathak, CEO and co-founder of SkyMel, and Drew Dimmick, CTO and co-founder of Prompt 360. They discuss the necessity of check-in balances for autonomous agents, the implications for various industries, and real-world use cases for these agents, including customer support and enterprise IT management. Ethical considerations and potential ramifications such as the need for governance frameworks and liability issues are explored. The conversation also touches on the future of AI agents in enhancing day-to-day tasks, reducing menial work, and creating new types of jobs. The episode concludes with a discussion on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and A2A (Agent to Agent) communication protocols that facilitate the cooperation between agents, making systems efficient and flexible.

Transcript

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So having an autonomous agent do something without check-in balances, obviously it's not gonna work. If you have the right check-in balances, then it shouldn't be that much of a problem. The only difference though, is we as humans, when we grow up, we have a lot of environment conditioning. Like the fact that we understand, well, this is ethical and this is not ethical.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

And so when you get to doing those kind of menial or travel planning, like things, know, while it might've been fun in the past when I had less stresses on my life, it's not fun right now. You just want to get it done and you want something that truly understands, you know, all of the things that you're looking for and take care of that for you. in our our resource constrained environments, having something like an assistant, being able to do that for you reliably is super. Attractive.

And I think that will be quite beneficial for society in general because there we don't have enough people to get the work done.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Welcome to mainly ai. I'm Dan Mitchell and we're joined by my co-host Viby Jacob. Today we are going to talk about ag agentic ai. Alright so it's a really timely topic here. We're gonna talk about what are the implications, where is it being applied? it mean for the future? First we'll get into the definition. From there we'll talk some real world use cases. I personally wanna talk some tech about some recent news on MCP and A two A, those three letter acronyms and what those mean.

We'll get into ethical considerations. You know, we talked a little bit about I sent you a, a link to a paper that suggests that maybe we shouldn't have completely autonomous systems. So have you weigh in on that. And with that, I'd like to welcome Neetu, Pathak. She's CEO and co-founder of SkyMel, and Drew Dimmick, CTO and co-founder of Prompt 360. Welcome.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Thanks for having us.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

yeah. So why don't we have you introduce yourselves? Ni why don't you go first?

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

Yeah. So I'm Neetu Pathak, co-founder and CEO of SkyMel. So what we're building is an orchestration agent, what that means today. So three or four years back, you had a static pipeline of what model to run because you trained it once or tweakers once or twice a year. What we are doing is we are deciding in real time what the pipeline looks like to run your AI and deliver it in runtime.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Okay, great. Great. And Drew, tell us you know a little bit about yourself. You had an interesting job right before you did this startup too, so you can mention that and then what you're what you're building, what you're doing.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Sir, so Drew Dimick I spent the last six and a half years. As chief architect of a large financial services company based in Toronto. And there I got to see kind of the beginning of what we started working on here at Prompt 360, which is an agent approach to help IT organizations do research and respond to urgent matters like audit or cyber vulnerabilities by using a, an agent approach to go pull data from lots of enterprise IT systems.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Very Very cool. I love that, you know, there's so many different use cases for it and I think we're gonna have listeners from all aspects of technology, some people very technical and hands-on keyboard, other people who are really just trying to learn about AI in general. And there's all this buzz about agents and AG agentic. So, I think where we start off right is kind of the general definition of ag agentic.

If I were to average out everything, I searched on the internet, everything the LLMs tell me about Ag agentic. It's autonomous AI systems that act independently. In dynamic environments to achieve specific goals. Like that's a very academic definition of what it is and what it does. But you know, like, so we think about agents, like what are some of the things, Viby, that we would think about in that case? I.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

I think the first one is that the goals within an agent system are set by the human right. So we need to sort of be mindful of that. agents themselves are goal directed, meaning they strive to achieve the goal set by the human without any specific direction on how to achieve those, right? So they go through a process of multi-step reasoning, self-directed reasoning, and they act autonomously, which is acting independently to analyze the data, take actions, draw conclusions, et cetera.

And then the third thing is like they are context aware. They interact with the environment the tools, et cetera, and they're capable of learning as well as adapting from those interactions. So those are what I would call as like the three main characteristics. Of an agent system, so they're just not responding to a prompt, but actively working towards the human directed goal through a multi-step process.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

You guys weigh in, Neetu, Drew,

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

right here? Is this, is this accurate?

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

I mean, it is, so there are a lot of definition. Of agents. So what I did was just to kind of figure out what would be a 360 degree view of agents. I started looking through all the research paper. So one of the things people don't realize it, the term agent is not a new concept. It started coming up in machine learning research paper in nineties, but the concept actually started coming around sixties and seventeens.

Even if you look at so there, there was a paper which was talking about BID or it was PDI. So it was belief, desire, and influence. Yes, it was BDI. So, um, that was like the first concept of what we see today. I recently wrote a guest article where I kind of combined five different actions that agent needs to do. So first is called perceive. That means you can see the environment you are in. And then reason I. That means you can collect all the data and kind of make sense of it.

What does it mean, what the intent is? And also understand anomalies and constraints. One of the things people don't talk about an agent is, oh, you have a goal, but you still have to work within a constraint. Like if I ask an agent, Hey, can you book me a ticket from SF to India? Obviously I'll have some constraint in terms of money stops. So people don't talk about that. Every agent has to work within a constraint, so that's important. The next is obviously plan.

So now you have all the data, you have kind of your constraints and you go, uh, you have your goal. Now you are coming up with different decisions of how you can reach there. And once you decide the right path, then you have to act on it. And once you act, then you ha need to have an ability to monitor did you do it right or did you do it wrong? And if something went wrong, what went wrong? And you learn from it. And it's a feedback loop.

So, and this is not my definition, I just read a lot of paper to kind of combine everything together. What would a agent look like?

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Sure. Sure. Yeah. Um, drew, you got anything to add to that?

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Yes. Actually the great, uh, base definition and I like your concept model. Me too. we believe the same thing, or things in addition. You know, we really are stressing the memory and the embedded knowledge and that we learn as we're going through those processes because, that's where the real value starts to come in. For example, in our systems, we're spending a lot of time learning about topologies and it, subsystems.

And we are re remembering those so that when the next user comes along you're able to harvest that data. for additional queries, and that may be completely different intense, but need the same source data. So those the long-term memory and then the embedded knowledge graphs that we're looking at doing here are a huge part of the delivery that up the agent that is our solution alone, which is kind of interesting.

Almost everybody that's doing agent-based work agents themselves to other agents, and you've got this compounding effort on, which is which is powerful. And we don't e we haven't even seen the beginning of the potential there.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

That's exciting. Yeah, I, you know, when I think about LLMs and I try and compare that to agents. You mentioned the memory required. So having that idea of you need to have memory of things I've told you before as an agent, almost comparing it to an employee trainee, right? They come new to the job, you say, these are the rules, you know, that you have to work these hours, you have to do these things, and and then you need to come back tomorrow and do it.

You can't forget everything you just did today that I trained you on. And then you start to learn and you get better at your job. So I think that's an important point. like, if I were to compare that to an LLM, like a chat GPT or a Claude, I can go interact with them. And today I can have them do some things. I can have it create a Word doc for me. So how is it different from a traditional LLM that I would interact with?

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Well, I'll take that one. So the, the use cases that we're looking at there, there's a couple of constraints in the overall ecosystem that we're involved in. So, any. Financial services or large it organization is reticent to export their data and have it preserved in the context of any of the large language models. In fact they actively try and prohibit that.

So they want to take advantage of the training and the work that the large models are done, then it may do some fine tuning and get a slice of that model to use internally, but they're not feeding that information back and they see that as an information security risk actually. and and a data governance risk that needs to be really closely monitored. So that's kind of given us impetus to look at other ways for us to do that.

And conveniently, the ag agent approach with the memory facilities that we have inside of our system allows the customers to completely control all that memory information. Within their four walls whether that be in a VPC on a cloud or on a on-prem system, that's kind of irrelevant, but it's under their control. And so the risk of data scape is much, much less. And it lends to the notion of agentic topologies in general because wanna have separation of concerns for those kinds of things.

And that is a needs will be a continued pattern inside of the enterprise. That goes back to good practices for data security across most enterprise environments is, you know, zero trust models. Only people that have access, have need can get access to things and just do that from a design footprint. And AG agentic models need to be following that in order to be successful inside of large enterprises, but they're also quite powerful and delivering all these capabilities.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah. And you know, I just kind of thinking about, and we're gonna get into a little bit later in the in the, the podcast, we're gonna get into kind of the ramifications of agents and liabilities and all those aspects. But Viv, do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the applications that we're seeing out there, or potential applications.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Absolutely. I think like, just to close on Drew's point absolutely. Like, you know, the LLM is where we are just responding to a prompt like a single step sort of a process, but the agent is far more complex interactions that follow. And Drew alluded to pretty much all the different aspects like memory as well as security, as well as making the data leaks, et cetera. Which become even more important and prevalent in the age of ai, agent ai. Right.

I think on the application side, what I would say is like we read in the industry about Morgan Stanley's internal advisor agent, right? Where you're like getting. Financial analysts with supporting agents, supporting them with complex queries. We read about like software tools like PR agent that conduct code reviews.

So we are seeing a lot of these implementations are not simple theoretical constructs, but more of like operational systems that are driving efficiency gains that are measurable and also where mistakes carry real consequences, right? More or less the industry is pointing that like most of the efficiencies as well as that come from these applications are in specialized domains where the stakes are highest.

One big example that's being quoted is like Toyota's multi-agent system claiming reduction in production planning by 71%, right? That's a huge number. Diagnostic assistance in clinic, clinical decisions augmenting expert judgment. So I'm curious as to, these are sort of like what we read in the industry as well as sort of like being quoted. to hear more from Knee to end drew us to some of the examples that they're seeing.

Then that would be one area that we could explore in terms of what are some of the real world as well as, especially in the IT world, what are some of the examples that we are actually seeing being operationalized?

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah, that, and I'd also like to hear about some of, where you see it going in the future, like some of the

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Mm-hmm.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

dreaming,

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Yep.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

What could it possibly do in the future type thing. But we'll get to that. So, yeah. You know, let's hear some real world examples. I mean, startup people talk to tons of prospects, customers friendly faces, where do you hear these things going? Where are people thinking about applying these agents? How do you see them solving the problems? And what is the benefit for them? I.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So from my perspective, there are two places where people are trying to use agents. One where either redu automating it reduces the time it takes to get a certain thing done, or humans are unable to do that work. Even if you put a lot of, like for example, if you have to send personalized email today, if a person has to do that each email might probably take 30 to 40 minutes. And even then it'll not be personalized.

But if you create an agent that goes and scrape a web, kind of creates a profile of the person that they're. Sending to have an idea about what kind of this profile would respond to and then create an email that's just code running 24 7. But a human cannot do that. The agents are coming handy where you either want to reduce the time it takes to deliver something or increase the revenue that comes out of it, even if there is a little bit of mistake.

Like even if you make five person mistake out of a hundred people, five person didn't like the personalized email you sent, but you are getting nine five, that's still better than industry standard right now.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah. And that's an interesting one because you know in that the stakes are not super high, right? So if it does make a mistake and you have a 5% error of margin, that's okay because it just means that maybe you didn't get that opportunity to sell to that person, right?

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

so yeah. In that I would say, okay, so I was talking to this another company that is com customer support. And basically AI is doing customer support, but people don't like talking to ai, right? So you have to pretend that you're not ai, like you have to have a very novel conversation. In that scenario, that 5% is not okay. You want to reduce it even further because if 5% people know that you're talking to ai, they'll tell other people that, Hey, this company is using ai.

Uh, so it really depends upon use case to use case and what you're trying to achieve using agent ai.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

I agree with that. You know, the most recent example is like cursor having a moment, right? Having a agent, customer support, and users actually complaining about it, right? A whole thread suddenly spins up and leads to even a bit of a dent on the reputation, right?

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah. What about you, drew? What? What are you hearing?

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

We're hearing it for, from our initial customers with our solution. they want to have an agent AI solution looking at their it portfolio. And these are things like components and moving parts and pieces inside of their portfolio. It's constantly changing. And then you have another impetus into that whole circuit, which is all of the standards and procurement activities are going on. You may have a vendor gets deprecated, another one gets added.

You may also have security concerns around certain versions being vulnerable or an, or have have toxic licenses, for example. And these are all things that people that are building out enterprise applications have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. It's really arcane, slow, hard to do work that's necessary, and it creates huge inefficiencies inside of their develop, development and value delivery chains they don't do it right.

So, for example, one of our customers had a POS system going into place. And they weren't keeping track of their software supply chain and all of the different aspects of that. And it turns out that one of the components that they had inside embedded in the system, was going obsolete. And when they got to release time, they didn't know that it was going obsolete until they just were about to ship it.

And then they had to pull back and go back and completely rewrite their stack because it was a very, very essential part of their component architecture. And, so that probably cost them months in development time to go remediate that. Our approach is that hey, let's automate all that stuff and have it done, you know, on demand or nightly or weekly.

Take a look at where you are with your development stuff, compare it to your standards, compare it to your vulnerabilities and software supply chains and contracts, and make sure that. You what you're building is gonna be shippable. That's just one of the use cases, but this one is huge amounts of savings. We, by our estimates, it's somewhere around 80% savings compared to the typical work that's done in this. Just doing the data gathering and the doing.

The comparison of that is, is takes weeks. So if people don't do it well then they end up getting that problem when they go to ship. So we want to help avoid those problems and prevent those kind of issues when they're going to market

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Right. And, and to, uh, NI's point they work around the clock. Right. You

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

all the, all the time. Right.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

you don't have to worry about agents and shit. Well, I mean, eventually they may self-organize into a union. You never know, right? But we'll see. We'll see how that goes. Um.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

But when Drew was talking about data gathering and, and this LMS looking, I just remember a very funny conversation. So I've had conversations with people who do nine to five jobs, right?

And there's this constant fear that they cannot talk on the Slack channels or emails that freely anymore because LMS can consume all the data and much easier to figure out what you said before you didn't care because like, oh, they're collecting so much data, be just too difficult for them to go through all of it. But now you cannot have personal conversations on work forum anymore. Uh, so yeah, it is making a lot of difference in our day-to-day life. Our habits are changing.

We are just not aware about it.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah unless the LLM decides to jump in on the conversation since they start teaching LLMs effective use of gifs and emojis yeah, I think they'll be part of it. may be the most popular even. It's hard to say.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

Yeah,

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

the moment you can personalize them, there'll be the sweetheart everyone needs. They're all a, acting as a therapist for a lot of people, so.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah, as long as they don't claim to be licensed like that that one instance there. But yeah. Yeah. So talked a lot about where we're solving problems today. You know, futuristic view, right? Smart cities, even higher stakes would be AI in defense, if we could imagine that. I don't know if we're ready to trust it quite there. Creative is still very, very controversial, I would say. Because the argument and mostly from the artists is that, it can't come up with anything it hasn't already seen.

And I would argue that neither can humans but. idea, and I think I was at an IDC conference a year ago. They kind of painted this picture of personal assistance, right? And the idea that you could have this assistant that has access to everything in your life and it knows your preference on where you want to sit on the plane and what you're willing to spend those constraints. But then also can map out how long it takes for you to walk from one spot to the other.

So it doesn't order the Uber for you until you get a little bit closer and then it orders that for you. I think that with all that potential, risk is that we become maybe not too dependent, but maybe a little bit lazy. Once it starts doing everything for us. A lot of people talk about it unlocking new. Time and availability for us. but I don't know. I don't know. Um, you know, if you've seen the movie Wally, it's kids movie.

That's a little scary for me floating around in a chair drinking soft drinks and outer space while everything goes to hell. And I'm like, is that what agents are gonna be in the future? What do you think?

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

There are like couple of points to unpack. You had a lot of things right? The, once we are successful agents, what the future would look like. But if we come today like what would be the immediate future if we can create something good enough with agents? Um, so actually I had a thought and I kind of made lost it. Drew, do you wanna take it? And maybe I'll come back.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Sure. Hopefully I didn't lose my thought. I do that all the time. so, I, see agents we're all busy people, right? And in, in our target customers we're doing, but even in my own life, I, you know, I think of the travel assistant one, when we're booking a family trip I've got a full-time job. I'm doing a startup. You know, I've got a lot of stressors in my personal life.

And so when you get to doing those kind of menial or travel planning, like things, know, while it might've been fun in the past when I had less stresses on my life, it's not fun right now. You just want to get it done and you want something that truly understands, you know, all of the things that you're looking for and take care of that for you. in our our resource constrained environments, having something like an assistant, being able to do that for you reliably is super. Attractive.

And I think that will be quite beneficial for society in general because there we don't have enough people to get the work done. And so, that's, you know, having an assistant be able to do those kinds of things and then have people doing higher order work is much more desirable.

So, for example, if I don't have to deal with travel planning, I have all sorts of time that I can spend thinking about something far more creative and far more interesting, that, that's much more beneficial to myself or my family or the company I'm working for.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

I see agents largely taking busy work out of people's lives. I think that's the first thing that it will do for us. And then certainly they'll get more intelligent and more capable, but we're also gonna be getting more capable.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

Now Dan I remember what I was thinking. So when you were talking about consumer, right? You kind of talked about two different things like in art. So mostly art is for entertainment, right? And the other one was convenient. So you're talking about AI system as convenient and wherever art and creativity is coming is for entertainment. And one of the places I was kind of blown away, but. Imagination of people is when the Ghibli thing came out of OpenAI, right?

I read this one comment on Reddit and they were like, oh, soon we will be able to take any movie and ask it to be converted into a certain style and I can watch the same movie in a hundred different styles. That was mind blowing and that is not something that can be done by human. So you are consuming the same plot, but with different expression, different kind of people. You can even change the character that you want that person to play.

So that's a different way of thinking about entertainment. The other that obviously, uh, both Drew and you kind of data about the AI system doing the task so that we don't have to do manual stuff like ordering things on time, taking calling a plumber, making sure that everything is fine after they're gone. All the small, small things that we do on a daily basis. Like if that work gets taken away, we'll have a lot of time. And the last thing he said that, oh, we might be in now world like Wally.

Technically we can be, but with all the geopolitical things that we have today, it's very hard where a government is paying for you to just relax. That is never going to have happen in pretty much any part of the world. So that means if you want to have a job, you have to find a way to stand out. Everyone gets a job because there, there is a demand and there is supply. So if everyone is using ai, what can you do different that produces better results with AI that anyone else cannot do?

So I think people will get creative because we need jobs. So yes, we'll get lazy in certain part of the life, but at the end of the day, we still need to work. And I don't know what that kind of jobs would look like. For instance, when YouTube and everything came around, influencers became a job, right? That was not a job. 20, 30 years ago, people found a way to make money out of it. So we'll see some more creative jobs coming out of it.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

That I agree with. Definitely, definitely. What are you thinking? Vi.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

I think there have been plenty of innovations and inventions in the past that have taken time out from the system, right? And I believe in the human tenacity, resilience as well as like intelligence as to how we overcame those, whenever those sort of like time saving measures, et cetera have happened, we have evolved, actually we have become more resilient, creative, intelligent, et cetera, right?

So is the human as well as agent coexistence is what I think as more augmentation of the human rather than a replacement of the human Wally was a great movie, but I think that really exists as like the bookend of utopia. So, uh, that's the way I see it,

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Wally worked very hard as a, uh,

Viby JacobViby Jacob

right?

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

uh,

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Robot?

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

know, as a robot agent. So,

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Yeah.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Okay, changing gears a little bit let's get a little bit into technology. First we've talked about agents and what they are, but the idea of them working together, and where they can work and how they work together. Yeah. I would assume that you can have them work together like real people, right? Because the idea is that they're supposed to be like people as agents and figure things out, right? So they should be able to work together. Correct.

Okay. So recently we saw a couple of announcements and I think maybe everybody's on the same page that they need to work together. Anthropic released this concept of MCP, right? MCP came out. It doesn't mean everybody was all in it, but next thing you know, it's blowing up all over X and then there's this massive proliferation of MCP servers. This guy nuttle his website, playbooks.com, he's got 3,900 servers in a directory on that website, right?

So what's so great about MCP and what does it actually do for the agents?

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

So it's a, it was a key enabler for us. We we were actually building our own concept like MCP until MCP came along and then all of a sudden we're like, yeah, sure. We're just gonna pivot over to using that. 'cause it makes a lot of sense. and I would reference some work done by Octo Tools which I think is underrecognized in the MCP success story, with the concept of tool cards in particular. And May, and maybe it was somebody earlier than Octa Tools, but the first time I saw that was with our.

with Octo, having those tool cards available to you so that you can go get data from systems and then process that through LLM is actually, a key enabler for any sort of agentic solution. Because without that context, you mentioned that earlier, Dan you, and that's context to me of, real data that's coming from real stuff, whether that be travel data or enterprise ID data, or you name it. It's all real data about what's going on in the world. You can't really make an agent solution successful.

So MCP unlocks that kind of real data context for us. A two A is interesting because now it gives us a standard way of interfacing with other autonomous agents. So MCP is all about getting data and interacting with the data. MCP or A to a is really more about how do I interact with other agents? And this is also work that we had in our roadmap that we wanted to get into because we see our system itself is gonna be an agent to others we'll be. like the subservient chicken, fine.

A lot of vendors don't want to be that. But new modern vendors will absolutely wanna be consumed by others as agents. And so we're off to doing our work independently and autonomously. You set us up to do all that work, and then we can feed and interact with other agents who may benefit from our work. That's a fantastic scalable approach to designing modern systems.

So, I think a two A is, you know, a welcome entry here it's taking a lot of bespoke work that a lot of people were doing independent of one another and making it standardized.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

so your point is it's not so much as to MCP or not to MCPM, CCP and A two A are complimentary, MCP allows you to connect to the content repositories, dev and environ, et cetera, and a two A

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Yeah.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

the multiple different agents together to form more of a multi-agent. So the two coexist in

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Yeah.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

okay?

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

So I'm making an agent that's really good at doing X. You're making an agent that's really good at doing y and another person's making another agent that might wanna need X and Y and add them together, or, cross multiply and divide, whatever, right? And, and that's we can't predict what that's gonna look like, and that's actually what we're unlocking.

So this is a fantastic architectural approach to unlocking enormous value by letting these autonomous systems do the things that they're really good at. And it's going to require, vendors to get on board.

Unfortunately, a lot of the legacy vendors don't wanna get into the A to a thing because of the threat to their, platform models and, bringing people onto their platforms and trying to entrap or en encase their data and in boats, that's there's gonna be resistance in the legacy to their detriment by the way, they will they'll end up getting surpassed by modern entrance.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

So with, so within

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Go. Go ahead.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

you know, would you say like the security are the constraints that you mentioned earlier, right? Are those managed or. Contained by the enterprise or by, is there any support

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Oh

Viby JacobViby Jacob

or from A two A or is it like the enterprise that's devising, that's putting together these agents are solely responsible for, all the security data leak, et cetera? How do you have to,

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

is always a shared concern, especially in the enterprise. You, everybody is responsible for security, to the call center agent all the way up to the c CEO and the C-suite. That's the way good security practices happen. When you're deploying assistance, it's no different, right? So whether you had a human assistant or an AI assistant they need to be handling data appropriately. Our approach, MCP has, a new solution.

It's not unexpected to see novel attacks and novel approaches to using it to do nefarious things or potentially nefarious things. If there's potentially some design improvements that could be done there. I've been particularly concerned that the observability and auditability of what an agent or an MCP, connection is doing is a critical concern for the enterprise. They need to know what these things are up to for audit and compliance purposes, as well as security purposes.

And then the identity and control and access controls, needs to be addressed. We have a very simple approach. Concept there, because our MCP approach is that a user having the agent do work for them, doesn't get access to data. They wouldn't have access if they went directly to the system. So we're not trying to create an overlay additional privilege access management layer. We're using the existing privilege access management layer that's in the underlying data source to do that for us.

And that's a good lightweight concept that makes MCP lot simpler to implement. But other MCP approaches are trying to implement an entire privilege access, authorization layer inside of the MCP server itself, which is gonna be duplicative of what all of these data sources already have and gonna create holes and gaps and coverage and unintended consequences there. So think we've got some architectural work to do. We've gotta go back to the gym. make that more mature. But Mc p's moving so fast.

It started with you know, standard out in input output, got went to server side events and that was in, into streaming HT TP and, and in a month. It's, it's the, and, and OAuth is now put into to context and on and on and on, like the inva innovation here. People are listening the community. I see a community of people doing this development is just amazing. And, we're just drafting on that tailwind because don't have the, we're five people in this startup.

I can't go build something as big as this, but this community is built something which is just awesome.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So I, I wanted to kind of draw on the history of MCP. So actually MCP was create open sourced in November. Obviously atropic might be using internally before that. The reason it blew up is. First, a lot of articles started coming out of A 16 C and other talking about model context protocol that, so whenever a VC firm starts writing something, it reaches the startups directly, right? Because they're kind of keeping track of it.

The second thing that happened that actually blew up is the announcement that OpenAI and Gemini might start using it. So there were a lot of tool calling softwares out there. MCP was not the only one, but there was no standardized approach that everyone would be using this one technology.

Suddenly the fact that MCP had approval from most of the biggest player, that's why it drew up, because now people were like, okay, even if it doesn't per work perfectly, the fact that everyone else is using it and the community as a whole is contributing to it, I can depend on it. I can create my software around it. It's not gonna break because this is going to keep getting better and better. Uh, the other thing I wanna say, just a distinction. So MCP is think about a code.

That directly talks to your databases that can receive, prompt and return you back something. So one of the reason people like MCP is there's a deterministic approach to your MCP server that otherwise is lost in agent to agent. So if you are asking another agent, Hey, can you tell me what my sales quota looked like last quarter? You cannot have 2.1 or 2.5 if your thing was 2.6 million, right? You need to have accurate data. So where wherever you want accuracy, MCP becomes a thing.

So in, in the best world, you'll have an agent that always refers to an MCP to get their data needs and the other agent ask this agent so that that data can be combined in different ways based on the context or the prompt they're receiving. So that's where a two A comes in and MCP is just to make sure that you don't mess up data that you're get getting from different places.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

I completely agree with that. Me too. That's, and also both of them just have great three letter acronyms.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

yes. And so, yeah, just for the, uh, for the, the folks listening the alphabet soup we just threw at you, MCP stands for model context protocol and a two A, as you would imagine is agent two, agent the two in the middle. Right. But you bring up an interesting point that there's there's definitely a halo effect when you see broad adoption of a standard. think somebody told me this week that there's something like 15 other.

Options to MCP, but because we're already down the path and people are able to adopt it very quickly, and it with a pretty low barrier to technical entry, especially if you're using coding assistance it seems very, very easy from what I've observed to be able to implement it. So I guess I could see how that would drive it, even though these announcements, they seem a little bit superficial to me. But fine. It is what it is. Right.

Okay. Shifting gears again let's talk a little bit about the ethical implications and challenges agents. Right. So one thing I'll mention again. So there is this. Paper that was published it's authored by Margaret Mitchell and Ava, gosh, both of hugging face. And basically what it says is we should not produce fully autonomous agents.

So that's kind of a counterpoint to what we've been hearing where people talk about, okay, we'll start with human in the loop and then we'll have human on the loop, which is the idea of supervising a team of agents, but going fully autonomous. We have clashing views here. I dunno what you've heard, Viby, but, I mean, it scares me a little growing up in the era of movies where robots take over the world, but that could just be a generational thing for me.

But at the same time, I could see how having fully autonomous agents who are performing tasks that you don't feel like there's a lot of risk could be beneficial. What do you think?

Viby JacobViby Jacob

I think the paper it's a great paper. I think what the paper suggests is that like we need to. Distinguish between levels of autonomy, levels of agents, right? Similar to any other autonomous systems like we have SAE levels in autonomous vehicles and robotics, et cetera, right? The more control that you give to a non-human entity, there is also the risk of there is more risks involved, right? So the paper suggests. Look, there are different types of agents.

We need to sort of like set a taxonomy for the agent autonomy so that like we can understand the risks better and also put in control mechanisms to man to manage it. And also like how do we verify some of the safety related aspects, right? So in order to drive those aspects, the paper is making a claim towards the fact that there is no clear benefit only coming out from fully autonomous AI agents. We need to, there's also foreseeable harm that exists with those, so we need to manage them better.

Right. That is the call to action coming out from that paper. Um, need to, and drew, uh, your thoughts on those.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So I, um. See agents are not that different at, if you give agents a complete autonomy and in a perfect world, they're logical, they're not that different from human, that is given a task. You every human needs check-in balances. You cannot ask a human to go, you know, give them $10,000 and ask them to do something and assume that they're going to only buy work stuff. There's a reason that you want race a you, somebody has to go through it. It's the same thing with agents.

So having an autonomous agent do something without check-in balances, obviously it's not gonna work. If you have the right check-in balances, then it shouldn't be that much of a problem. The only difference though, is we as humans, when we grow up, we have a lot of environment conditioning. Like the fact that we understand, well, this is ethical and this is not ethical. Or for, like, I, I gave a very simple example. So suppose if you have an agent that is supposed to avoid churn.

If it learns that it doesn't show people who churn in the report, then the churn rate is low. I mean, it achieved its goal, right? But that's not an ethical way to do things. So for an agent to understand those small nuances that we human do, that's why they are more dangerous than a human is. And you'll always need some kind of human oversight no matter how smart they get.

Just because the way we perceive the world and the way we want to exist in this world is going to be always different than the way agents exist in the world. Drew, what do you think?

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

I totally agree. You know, my mental model on this is probably a little simpler. I don't think auto autonomous, truly autonomous agents really exist. There's always some sort of human in the loop. It's just how many layers of the onion out are you from that, and the feedback the controls that you would have on those agents needs to be clear. But there is always going to be the checks and balances that you mentioned me to.

May be some may, maybe in some cases that's an accident investigation, right? Like that's the sad, unhappy path, right? Because something went wrong in the way some agent was behaving in a, in a vehicle. You know, but the, having the advantages of having these autonomous agents probably vastly outweigh the disadvantages or the concerns provided that the controls are there.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Well, ni too, you made a interesting point. Like, so when you grow up, right, you've got this notion of ethics, and maybe some people don't, but for the majority of humans, I believe that the majority of humans are good, right? So if I were equate, if I were to equate that to raising a young person, right? So the agent is my young person. The responsibility, the accountability. So if you're raising a child and the child does something dumb, the parent is accountable. Right.

So if we get to a point where these agents are working in a fairly autonomous environment and they screw something up, who is accountable?

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So I have heard a lot of different founders come up with different ideas, and I think the one I liked the most was the fact that they should be an insurance company. So because I mean, having a kid and a parent is a very different thing. But in a world where everything is based on ROI, my agent is working with another company's agent, and if it makes a mistake, there is an insurance company that pays for it like PayPal, right?

So it, it paid the merchant before receiving the money, and if something went wrong, they kind of managed both the, it's like a broker kind of thing That makes more sense than the ethical consideration of who's gonna take a blame. Because I don't think anyone is gonna take a blame when agents go, Hey, is it the company that's providing the model? Today's element, it can be something else. Or is it the data it was trained on? Is it the prompt that someone wrote?

It's a very hard question, and I think the easiest way would be to have an insurance broker in between.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

It's a, it's a novel idea.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

It's a great, yeah, it's a, it's a great idea. Um, I would say that having worked in the insurance business for a little bit, there will always be lawyers underneath it trying to assign the liabilities to the various piece parts and, and that's. of our legal system and, and, uh, and the accountabilities that it builds. So I would expect that these are considerations that need to be put into place and we should be conscious of, the potential risks.

And that, that's, so our opinion as we're building out this thing is, it is we're providing soft output reports and, insights into enterprise data. We could take actions, right? But we are taking a wait and c approach there because a, the risk tolerance of our customers may not accept us going and making changes to live production systems based on information that we discern. As they get more comfortable with it. Will they do that? I am pretty sure they will. How long is that gonna take?

We love to say that AI is moving really, really fast. But I think that, if you look at autonomous driving and the complexity there and how long it's taken us, and the lack of completion of that you know, our, all of the starry-eyed prognosticators that we're saying it was gonna happen in a year, and we're all gonna be driven to work by, by, by our car, and we can have a cup of coffee and relax, hasn't happened yet. not reliably and not, to the level that people are.

So I think that adoption is gonna have a long curve ahead of us. These systems are of equal complexity that I deal with. I think other human systems are gonna be of equal complexity. But there's tremendous opportunity for us to all learn and really build that better.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

If I, I, if I sum up like the agents have transformational value we need to have governance frameworks like need to mention insurance or like other liability measures, et cetera. Have the proper organizational operational culture and frameworks in place. And then also tailor the business problems that are e amenable to the risk posture for a agent-based approach, like you mentioned, drew, based on the risk profile or the appetite that they have currently. Right.

And then evolve over time, depending on how technology, as well as frameworks evolve. the gist that I'm hearing. In terms of like, let's not get bogged down by the, you know, all the risks, et cetera. Let's look at what's possible and let's kind of like move with optimism.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

No matter what happens or what we might think we want to happen with agents and liability, everything is gonna be figured out at that first court case. Where, the agent ends up in court and it's trying to defend itself through an LLM conversation. it may hallucinate in there even though it's under oath. It's hard to say. But I think that whatever, whatever happens there that's gonna set precedent and then we'll just all have to follow suit anyway.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

The one thing that you, Dan, so the fact that when humans say something that's incorrect, either they're ignorant or they're lying, but LLM is always hallucinating so it can strategy.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

That's right, that's right. In fact, the LLM will have to swear on perplexity that, that it, that it is speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. So verified and perplexity.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

Hall.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Right?

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah, it's true. It does. It does.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

and, and, and you'll get a different answer tomorrow. So I.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

So, so where do we wanna go from here? Viby. What, what's next? Like, we got a little bit of time left with these folks. Um, you know, the, the future, you know, what do you think?

Viby JacobViby Jacob

I think like, one, one question I have is like, you know, there are so many applications that you mentioned from agentic AI perspective, right? If we look at the AI world we kind of like, here are three or four top use cases, right? Content generation, code generation, customer support, et cetera, right? Within agent ai, do you see anything that's sort of like popping up? Like, you know, top three five, your top three five, where you think, the most common agent AI applications would be?

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So one trend that I'm seeing is use of voice ai. So obviously you can talk a lot faster than you can type, and you can read a lot faster than you can hear. And that is taking, obviously people haven't figured out, but there are a lot of things that are coming up to increase human productivity. Like instead of typing, you're speaking and then you're just seeing the responses back. But according to me, that will make the change into something called invisible ui.

So right now we have a lot of websites, right? We, if I want to find an article, I have to go and search it and I have to click a couple of buttons. Sometimes I have to Google, Hey, how do I go and do this? That wouldn't exist. Your entire website could be recreated or shown based on your conversations. If I want to cancel. My subscription, you know, I can, Hey, how do I cancel? It brings up the page that I want.

There'll still be some visual elements, but what I'm seeing, I don't see us clicking through everything. And it also might be possible that the webpage design itself can be very different. What I see versus what you see might be very different. And that's in a different era of how the businesses are done and everything is sold. The lines between marketing, sales, creative writing, engineering product, everything is going to blur.

Um, yeah, I'm very clear about that and I do see that changing the entire life cycle of the product. Its itself.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Very interesting. Drew your thoughts.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Actually really similar. I think it is helping us accelerate you know, where human, our human frailties or whatever you want to call it, are are getting in the way of us really progressing as fast as we can. And so when you talk about you know, reading and speed of reading and I think those are gonna help accelerate the.

The human condition, it's gonna, it's gonna come out in a number of different forms and things that I can't wait to see what this community innovates on because it's all to, to be seen. We're, we are just at the very tip of the iceberg this. So, I'm excited to see it, but I, I don't dare say where it's gonna go,

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

It's probably

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

I wanna, I, but I wanna be on the iceberg, right?

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Yeah, definitely. We would rather be on the iceberg So yeah, I think, last one, uh, humans and agents, right? Talked a little bit about will humans retain control of agents? I think they'll try you know, and do as best they can. We'll have this concept of humans managing agents as companies get leaner and they get into you know, especially for like the task worker model. You can have a bunch of agents doing that work, but they still need some supervision.

David Linthicum, well-known cloud guy also into a lot of AI stuff. Now. He said the other day, is there an ROI in agents? And it got me thinking a little bit about, well, it depends on how expensive the it is, or how cheap it is for a human to perform a task, So we went through this whole era of, outsourcing and offshoring and trying to drive down the cost of technology, right? And as we know, are still pretty expensive.

So if you take a use case like a coding assistant, or you can generate lot of code and it's relatively good, does it save you the money of the coding assistant doing the job of that developer, and now you don't have to pay that developer. Or maybe you can do it with two developers instead of 10. Okay. Fair. Right, because again, developers are expensive, call center agents as a kind of counterpoint are not as expensive.

So are you gonna see the same ROI or are you gonna see sufficient ROI for moving to those types of agents? If you were to replace call center representatives with agents

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

yeah, uh, I can, uh, so, uh, there's one company I know about from our customer interviews, what they're telling me a story about their use of ai. For con call centers actually in particular, and there was absolutely return on investment there. it actually flips the equation of their claim. It was a claims processing workflow and use case that involved a lot of paper and receipts and things like that. So I think like corporate expense reports kind of stuff.

they flipped the ratio from 95% manual handling of those things to 95% automated by using. An AI design system that is essentially an ag agentic AI system. What's the human implication there? Right? You have contact centers and people doing paperwork, task work that are high turnover. The least. I mean, is they turned over people every four months on average. You know, you can't, people can't keep people in these jobs, so they're able to do the work.

Then they might have needed, a hundred people and now they need 10, right? they flip the ratio they're able to do with 10 people. Those 10 people are making a little more money 'cause they're actually doing higher value work and ha and handling the true escalations, better and more aggressively. So custom, meanwhile the customer experience is going up into the right. So ROI. Is a really interesting thing. Right. And it actually comes back to most enterprises.

That's where I'm working in, don't really do full, full bore TCO analysis that would drive their ROI setups and they tend to be cherry-picking in a lot of cases and it becomes political. And so I would say yes for sure. There are use cases that have ROI absolutely. Money back guarantee.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

So,

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Is it universal? No.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

but then I'll take it more from a psychology perspective. Even now, if you see there are certain use cases where people don't wanna talk to other human in contact center. If I have to see my bill, I would rather log in than call and phone, right? And even if I'm calling a phone, I'll probably select one to hear my bill. I wouldn't wanna talk to a person.

The reason I wanna talk to a person is because whatever constrained choices they have for me, first I have to listen through all the press, one for this, press two for this. And it might not even, I might go through all that thing and find out that they don't have answer to what I'm looking for. And that's when I wanna go to human, because I feel it's gonna be faster. Or they might have certain information that the compromised version is not gonna have.

So if you can flip the script, like if that when I'm calling someone can give me all the answers that I need and it's accurate, we are becoming very as humans, we are actually becoming more introvert. We don't wanna talk to other person. People don't take calls, people like messaging. So we will prefer not to talk to human unless we feel like the humans have certain information for instance, okay.

If there is a, so, so something got just launched, there is a good chance that the people in customer support doesn't know about that product as much yet, or the bugs as much yet. So the agent can do that much better because it's just, you know, they get the data and they have all the recent knowledge. Human people need to be trained for it.

But if I feel like, oh, something really bad is happening in the com company and they really need to understand from a human, get some kind of inclination what might be happening, I will probably call a customer agent because they might know if there is something down or they might know from other conversation what might be happening so they can co-create assumptions that software systems cannot. So yeah, I mean, there'll be a huge ROI just to switch away for whatever questions.

We don't actually need to talk to a human. Everything else can be, uh, automated.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

you're talking customer satisfaction, which drives ROI because it's customer retention, it's the right, it's efficiency. People are happier overall, will recommend your company.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Yep.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

I could see that.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Well, and there's really strong evidence, Dan going back into the nineties when I was helping with contact center and tech support stuff, customers back then didn't want to talk to people. They actually would rather have read, on our uh, dating myself. But they would rather go into a bold board system and see a tech note, right? To see what, how to solve. They wanna self solve. They don't want to interact with other people because they're trying to move at speed.

And the talking to a human means you're sitting in an on hold queue. You're wasting time. You have to get them up to speed on what's going on. Half hour later you're still not getting an answer that you want. And that's, if you can do a lot of stuff in self-service, it is better in general for the customer. And that overall, ROI, which to me is related to TCO becomes much higher. Totally agree. Me to like, and the psychology hasn't changed.

I don't think it's actually changed as much as you're asserting. That would be the only place I would push back a little bit as I think this has been human behavior for a long time.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

I, it could be a little bit generational, it could be side effect of COVID and Covid kit. It could be a few different things, but no I mean, just to share a quick anecdote with you. So, the other day I needed to call the pharmacy about a prescription refill that they had the prescription on file and every other time. Time that I've called the automated system hasn't been able to help me, right? Because it has no idea that this is on file. It doesn't understand that concept.

They had introduced at this pharmacy the notion of, oh, well if you can't be helped, you can leave a message. So you don't have to talk to a person. You can leave a message and it will forward that message to the pharmacist and then you can choose to get a call back or not if they're able to solve your problem entirely. what happened this last time when I called was something different.

So in the past I had sent the voice message and then I got a text saying, oh, your prescription's being filled. No problem. This time it sent me back a summary of the message that I left. So that meant that at some point, some system. what that was and pass that along to me and presumably pass it along to the pharmacist. So we're seeing little iterative improvements in these systems where there's this interpretation of the communication you're trying to send forward.

And so I, that was kind of a nice feature that, yeah, to that point, it did make me want to keep going with that pharmacy because it got a little bit easier, Well, we've taken up a lot of your time, we really appreciate here. I think that we'll probably wrap up. You know, today we talked about ag Gentech, ai, we talked about its applications, ethical concerns. What is it gonna look like in the future? Any kind of parting thoughts before we wrap up?

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

I'm looking, I need to, um, so, uh, I think underlying psychology here is really interesting to, to unpack that. I think we look at the underlying human motivations here and why agents are attractive. And then Dan, your example to me is really important uh, improperly or implemented agent, like what you interacted with your pharmacy. And I think I know what the pharmacy is. Um, it's horrible. It drives people away and it makes people sour on automation.

So That approach agentic AI to do tasks like that because they're with so much knowledge and ability and context, unlike any system, you know, an IVR system that's ever existed on the planet customer experiences will be much higher and I think the tolerance for interaction with agents will go up higher because the experiences will be better.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Okay. Me too. Anything.

Neetu PathakNeetu Pathak

I mean, I know this is a very controversial topic where people feel like agents are gonna take away their jobs. It always happens when the new technology comes along. But that the thing is. These concerns will be there till we start seeing new jobs that are getting created when these agents are taking away jobs and use the situation. There's always this in-between time where you don't know the new jobs are coming and you're losing the existing ones.

So yeah, I mean we, I don't know what kind of jobs will come in future. It'll be very interesting to see probably working with agents when it hallucinates or oversighting agents. I don't know. Maybe it'll allow people to write novels that were really bad at writing or create children books that they couldn't do before. So what is gonna change? And I don't know what looks like, but humans will always have jobs.

I don't think we, I see a future where we will not have jobs and agents are doing everything.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

That's great insight. Viby, why don't you wrap us up?

Viby JacobViby Jacob

I think it was a great discussion. We started with agentic AI definition. Some of the characteristics, how it differ, differs from standard automation, which is like a, rules-based heuristic sort of approach some of the leading applications. We heard differing thoughts on, the path forward for agent ai. consensus around the fact that we need to look at the potential of AI agents rather than the risks associated with fully autonomous agents and you know, go from there, right?

And really put in place the governance frameworks, the control mechanisms, et cetera, that's necessary to harness the potential out of any invention, any tool. In this case, AI agents, right? some of the examples that were mentioned were very realistic as well as like, you know, something that everybody can relate to, including a pharmacy example, right? So I think it, it for almost comes down to this, if we like factor in the labor economics, the ROI.

Provide a path for implementation of ai agents. It can take you know, that there is massive transformative potential associated with it, and we definitely should get on with it. Right? Not so much as a job replacement who thought about prompt engineering as a job like five years back, right? None of us con, contemplated that.

So there is definitely like shift in economics, in labor economics that might come about, like job descriptions and things like that, but certainly an avenue that we should you know, go forth with. I see.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

And now we're, and now we're automate. Now we're automating prompt engineering. So there you go.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

go.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

That was, that was a quick job.

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Yep.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

Alright,

Viby JacobViby Jacob

Very fast moving world, but with a

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

yep.

Dan MitchellDan Mitchell

excellent. Well, I wanna thank Nito and Drew for coming and joining us. I'm Dan Mitchell, my co-host, Viby Jacob, if you enjoyed this conversation today, please make sure to subscribe so you can hear future episodes and we'll drop a teaser on what our next episode will be. But for now, this is mainly ai. Thanks.

Drew DimmickDrew Dimmick

Thank you, Dan. Thank you. VI.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android